Thursday 17 November 2005 07.59 EST
First published on Thursday 17 November 2005 07.59 EST

In the days after September 11 2001, a Londoner in his 30s who prefers to be known only as David T made two grim discoveries. The first, and most upsetting, was that a close friend from school had died in the collapse of the World Trade Centre towers. The second discovery - in a way the more disorienting of the two - was what had happened to another former friend. In the years since the two had known each other well, he had become a spokesman for a prominent Islamic fundamentalist organisation, and now, in statements to the media, he was openly applauding the attacks.

David T's experience was hardly typical, of course. But it does reflect, in heightened form, the sense of post-9/11 confusion that seems to have motivated thousands of people to seek a connection, and some intellectual clarity, from the then nascent world of weblogs. "It was the kind of moment where you think: OK, hang on - how do I even begin to make sense of that?" David says today, over bottles of beer in a north London bar. "And that's what I've been doing for the last three years, really."

Harry's Place, the "blog" to which he is now a prolific contributor, has become one focus of Britain's culture of political blogging - regularly updated online journals of opinion and debate - which has burgeoned in the years since 9/11. Samizdata, by some measures the nation's most successful independent blog, claims around 15,000 different visitors a day; Harry's Place gets perhaps 9,000. The phenomenon may not yet have reached the wild heights of the US, where bloggers have claimed credit for several real-world political upsets, including the resignations of the news anchor Dan Rather and the Senate Republican leader Trent Lott. But what has emerged here is a fully fledged alternative wing of the opinion industry, challenging the primacy of newspaper commentators. All political viewpoints thrive within it, but one has become notably prevalent: the stance generally identified as "pro-war left", of which Harry's Place is an example. It is a line of argument that seems not to have diminished, in stridency or popularity, as the Iraq debacle has worsened.

Exerting influence as a member of this new commentariat is not just a matter of how many readers one attracts; it's a question of which ones. "The freakiest thing is when you hear [a prominent commentator or politician] quote back a line or a phrase that you've written, or something from a text you've brought to light," notes Mick Fealty, who runs the non-partisan blog Slugger O'Toole, covering Northern Irish politics. "Just last weekend, I read a whole sentence, in an editorial in one of the Irish Sundays, that I'd used the Friday before."

Samizdata, arguably the grandfather of British political blogs, is operated from a large and dimly lit flat in a pristine mansion block in south-west London. There are a few computers at the back of the main room, but the dominant feature is a leather-lined drinks bar - installed, according to Samizdata's founder, Perry de Havilland, by a double agent, who knew the flat's former owner and who paid for it with money from both MI5 and the KGB. (The flat is also now the headquarters of the Big Blog Company, a consultancy run by some of the Samizdata bloggers, which advises businesses on how to exploit the phenomenon.)

A vintage pistol lying on a side-table gives a hint of the Samizdata attitude; a more modern gun appears in a photograph on the blog's front page, on top of a copy of The Open Society and Its Enemies, Karl Popper's anti-totalitarian polemic. "The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist Illuminati, who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and [private] property," the site says. It was originally named Libertarian Samizdata, but too many of those involved became unhappy with the label: characteristically for libertarians, it seems, they were uncomfortable subscribing to a group ideology. "We are ... a varied group made up of social individualists, libertarians, extropians, futurists, 'Porcupines', Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshippers ... cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe," the site now explains, unhelpfully.

As I arrive, De Havilland is laughing, nearly hysterically, at a blog by Oliver Kamm, a London hedge-fund manager and member of the "pro-war left" who now also writes a column for the Times. "Just marvellous," says De Havilland. "I was thinking of making it Samizdata quote of the day. It's something to the effect that, well, there's no point in denying that our involvement in Iraq has inflamed [Islamist totalitarian] opinion. Why should we deny it? It's something we should be proud of!"

September 11 caused many ideological fissures, of course. But it's a fair bet that the split in British libertarianism - hardly a prominent movement in the first place - is probably one of the least well known. Some libertarians opposed any military response to the attacks, on the grounds that armies are tools of governments, and government is largely a bad thing. Others supported the war in Afghanistan, and later the war in Iraq, as attempts to spread or safeguard liberty. "It was between those who said it was just another big-government thing," says De Havilland, "and those who said, 'Excuse me, guys, but these nutjobs are trying to fucking kill us!'" Samizdata published its first entry on November 2 2001. "I look forward to hearing from all those out there in 'establishment punditland' who sneered at the effect of the US bombing," De Havilland wrote in an early posting as he watched the Taliban fall.

"Establishment punditland" was Samizdata's target from the start. In the US, the birthplace of blog culture, it was easy to see how almost any viewpoints expressed online were going to count as a breath of fresh air. All they needed to do to distinguish themselves was to diverge from the New York Times's establishment liberalism and from the ranting of rightwing talk radio. Britain's press, by contrast, has long been more politically diverse and unashamedly partisan, which may explain the blogs' lesser impact here. De Havilland's collaborator Adriana Cronin, who developed her vociferous views as a reaction to growing up in communist Czechoslovakia, laughs off suggestions that blogs might literally replace the mainstream media, but there is no disguising her passion. "If we had a slogan, it would be, 'We can't change the way news is written, but we can change the way people read the news.' So what we're saying is-"

"We're not competing with newspapers," De Havilland interrupts. (This is a habit of his, though it may also be a beneficial quality in a blogger: he isn't willing to wait before sounding off.) "But I tell you who we are in competition with, 100% direct competition, and that's your op-ed writers. We don't have a reporter in Kandahar, and you might, it's true - although in time we might have a blogger in Kandahar. But for the moment, sure: if your guy in Kandahar says X blew up Y, then X blew up Y. But when your editorial guy says, 'This is what it means,' that's when we say, 'Excuse me! You're completely wrong!'"

According to Wikipedia, the communally edited online encyclopaedia, the term "weblog" was probably coined by the pioneering computer programmer John Barger. As early as December 1997, Barger began posting brief daily updates to his website, Robot Wisdom, with particular reference to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - thereby initiating one particular argument that still dominates weblogs today. It was these brief, frequent, personal and opinionated updates that came to define the form. "Blog", the shortened version of the word - which also serves as a verb, meaning "to run a blog" or "to add news postings to your blog" - probably came from one early practitioner, Peter Merholz, who meant it as a joke. "For what it's worth, I've decided to pronounce the word 'weblog' as 'wee-blog'. Or 'blog' for short," he wrote on his site in 1999. "I didn't think much of it," he explained later. "I was just being silly, shifting the syllabic break one letter to the left. I started using the word in my posts, and some folks, when emailing me, would use it too. I enjoyed its crudeness, its dissonance."

There was something about the concept that lent itself to strident opinions on current affairs, and quickly, a few figures - the gay conservative British expatriate Andrew Sullivan, for example, and Josh Marshall, of the liberal Talking Points Memo - rose to prominence. Broadcasting your opinions is not the only way to blog about politics; several major UK sites, such as Guido Fawkes and PoliticalBetting, focus either on rumour-mongering or cooler analysis. But the appeal of the form to those with something to get off their chests was clear. Posts could be made instantly, within minutes of news events taking place, and could be two or three lines long. There was no need to wait until one had enough material, and time, to assemble a newspaper column - although, for most of the bloggers I spoke to for this article, maintaining their sites seemed to absorb many hours. (The time had to be found where it could; Oliver Kamm originally blogged in the middle of the night, when he found himself sitting up with his new children, and needed something to do.)

There were other advantages. The old barriers to access - the need to get a job at a newspaper, or a slot on television - didn't exist. You didn't even need to put a name to your views. (David T and "Harry", of Harry's Place, insist on preserving their anonymity because they do not want to aggravate their employers.) Bloggers could link to other bloggers' postings, to demonstrate their agreement or provide examples of views they despised. Later, many sites added the facility for readers to leave comments, often spawning debates that continued long after the bloggers themselves had moved on to other topics. (Amid the flourishing of all this online diversity, certain uniformities emerged. Opinionated political blogging frequently resembles a pub rant, and, as such, remains an overwhelmingly male pastime in the UK: Cronin, at Samizdata, and her much-read fellow libertarian Natalie Solent, are rare exceptions.)

"Mainstream media is operating in what I call a channel world," says Cronin, whose faith in the transformative power of blogs can sometimes resemble religious zeal. "You've got certain pipelines that are owned by somebody, and you've got the content, which is packaged and delivered to the final eyeball. Blogs, though, are part of a network world." The power of blogs, according to this theory, lies not so much in the persuasive force of any one specific rhetorician, but in the opportunities for connections to be made. Hundreds of people can quickly "swarm" around a particular issue, adapting it to their own purposes. Harry's Place was an important recruiter of canvassers on behalf of Oona King, and against George Galloway, at the last election, while the anti-war site Bloggerheads was instrumental in Backing Blair, a satirical campaign designed to reduce Labour's 2005 majority via tactical voting.

Online, power is the power of crowds; celebrity becomes dissipated. "On the internet," Cronin likes to say, "everyone is famous for 15 people."

As you step into Norman Geras's home, in Manchester's leafy suburbs, the words "cutting-edge cyberphenomenon" don't immediately spring to mind; in fact, they never really do, despite his being one of the country's most influential political bloggers. The retired Manchester university professor of government lives with his wife, a children's author, in a neatly furnished home, one room of which is densely shelved with books about cricket. "There must be 2,500 of them," says Geras, who speaks quietly, with a southern African accent. "Actually, who am I kidding? I'm quite particular about these things, and I've counted them: I know there are 2,500."

Another bookshelf, by the front door, is filled with nothing but copies of the New Left Review; Geras is a lifelong marxist who still describes himself as such. But he has also been a key online voice of the "pro-war left" - a position born, as for David T, of trying to resolve a serious case of psychological conflict in the months after 9/11. His site, Normblog, arose from a feeling of alienation "from people I perceived as being in my neck of the woods", he says - academic colleagues, friends, and (a point made frequently by bloggers of Geras's political persuasion) writers of articles in the comment pages of the liberal press, including this newspaper. "The next day [after 9/11], or the day after, I open the newspaper and see - within hours - people talking about 'blowback', 'comeuppance'. They didn't even have the sense of horror, of shock, to wait. I was just appalled. I thought, 'That's it.'" He has blogged every day since July 2003, with only about seven exceptions, including two Christmases and a spell when he was travelling and couldn't get to a computer.

In fact, there were plentiful expressions of horror - but it is true that many columnists did not leave the matter there. "It's not that they don't say, in a couple of lines at the beginning, that they're outraged," Geras says. "It's a matter of balance and judgment. You can only judge on the overall balance of what's said."

However justified their sense that their views were being squeezed from mainstream liberal debate, the hawkish left began to flourish online. Its members diagnosed what they saw as an unholy alliance between the extremist fringe of Islam and elements of the "hard left". A key function of sites such as Normblog became the forensic examination of the work of commentators who claimed to be explaining the reasons for the attacks, but who found themselves accused of trying to justify them. Other blogs set out to demolish offending articles by quoting them and then attacking them line by line - a practice that became known as "fisking", a derogatory reference to the Independent writer Robert Fisk, a regular victim of the approach.

"Why is it," says Geras, "that the people in our culture are genuine agents, who take criticism for what they do, whereas the terrorists, who come from wherever else, are always somehow effects of somebody else's actions?" As the talk in Washington and London turned from Afghanistan to Iraq, many natural leftwingers who could not resolve mixed feelings about the coming war found themselves visiting Normblog. "It was like a secret handshake - 'Do you read Norm?'" is how one journalist puts it.

How all these feelings metamorphosed into support for the war is harder to discern: it sometimes seemed as if the leftwing hawks, out of distaste for some aspects of the anti-war lobby, were propelled by magnetic repulsion to a default position of support for the war that didn't always ring true. Geras, for his part, supported it on the logic of humanitarian intervention. But doesn't the catastrophic state of Baghdad prove that, in this instance at least, they made an error? "Even if I come to a point where I have to say it was a mistake - and I hope it doesn't come to that, but it could happen, say if the whole thing degenerates into a terrible civil war, and even what we've seen so far is overshadowed - that would be a different thing from saying that the reasons for supporting the war when it happened were wrong," Geras says. "I genuinely thought intervention was unlikely to make things worse. A lot of antiwar critics say, 'You're an idiot. It was obvious that it would.'" So - has it? "As of now, I wouldn't say that. As of now, there's still a chance for a democratic future for Iraq."

The July 7 bombings newly energised the "pro-war left", leading to accusations - notably from Madeleine Bunting in this paper - that these "muscular liberals" are retreading the "clash of civilisations" thesis, giving voice to a kind of liberal fundamentalism as zealous as the religious fundamentalism it sets itself against. "You can hear the creak of the drawbridge being pulled up," Bunting wrote. "They believe they are surrounded by enemies - Muslims, and their dastardly non-Muslim apologists - and must defend to the last man the checklist of universal Enlightenment values that sustain their mission. Their most ferocious firepower is directed at former allies whom they regard as yet to see the light."

Not everyone who becomes a political blogger means their blog to start out that way, but the urge frequently proves irresistible. "It took less than a year," says Tim Ireland, who works in marketing and runs Bloggerheads, founded in 2002. (He has designed blogs for the Labour MP Tom Watson and the Tory Boris Johnson.) By 2003, Ireland was engaged in a half-serious campaign to force the prime minister to deliver on a promise to set up a publicly accessible email address. In brief, it involved an email address that looked similar to what Blair's might be, which soon started receiving email intended for the PM. He also used the address to email MPs. Ten responded to his missive, which, among other things, invited suggestions for names for Blair's new baby. "I can say with complete confidence that I am the only reason Blair's email facility was [eventually] developed," he says.

The build-up to the Iraq war, though, added a steelier and angrier edge to Ireland's campaigning. Partly because of the internet, he says, he was exposed to a far wider range of media sources than he might have been had he read a single newspaper, and he concluded that "I had the facts on my side. Blair had to be held accountable, to be shown that to manipulate and exploit the 'war on terror' for political gain was the wrong thing to do, morally and pragmatically ... eventually I just said, 'Fuck work.'" He made sure he looked after his existing clients, "but the reason I've been in politics more than marketing, really, is because there are people dying, and that outrages me."

He channelled his outrage into Backing Blair, which used its ironically pro-Blair stance - its slogan was "No Alternative" - to urge tactical anti-Labour voting. Half a million people visited the site, he says, where they found themselves being urged to vote Tory if necessary. Wasn't that an irresponsible thing to advocate, from a leftwing point of view? "No way were the Tories going to win," Ireland says. "I would have bet my left testicle on it."

Similar anti-Blair sentiments, meanwhile, were being wittily expressed by Justin McKeating of the Hove-based site Chicken Yoghurt. McKeating spent the run-up to the 2005 general election closely following, and blogging about, the campaign in his constituency, reporting on encounters with candidates and canvassers. It was a version of the "citizen journalism" increasingly prevalent in the US that only threw into relief how little of the same seemed to be going on among the British blogs.

There are, of course, a thousand other shades of political viewpoint throughout the "blogo-sphere" - a word every blogger I spoke to in person grimaced when using, though nobody seemed to have an alternative. Conservatives can get their fix at two prominent blogs, Conservative Commentary and Blithering Bunny, while the UK Evangelical Blog, run by Adrian Warnock, also figures high in the charts.

How much does it all really matter, though? Britain's bloggers are divided not just by ideology, it turns out, but by their perception of their own importance: while Samizdata proclaims that blogs are the future, for example, Oliver Kamm insists they are an essentially parasitic medium, that can only exist insofar as it feasts on the output of traditional media.

But on the subject of motivation, the near-physical urge all the bloggers I spoke to felt - to join the debate, to make waves - seems to have been surprisingly uniform. "I got sick of breaking televisions by throwing things at them," is how De Havilland puts it. "If we lived in a world where actual facts could be discussed rationally, I'd happily disappear back into my cage and sell tat for a living," says Tim Ireland. But the drive that he feels, he says, "will not allow me to shut down until Blair is held accountable".

"Harry", of the eponymous Place, recently announced he would be giving up blogging, for work and family reasons, but David T says he doesn't believe him. "He says he's given up, but he'll be back, because blogs are like crack and you can't quite ever give it up," says David. Or not like crack, but pornography: "The internet grew, as so many industries did, because of people's desire furtively to find pornography," he points out. "I sometimes think blogging is the political equivalent to that." He spends only a brief time writing his own blog entries, he says - but hours reading through readers' comments. "That sort of thing can ruin your marriage. You're never cured - you're only in remission. You're only ever a recovering blogger"